Peter Kaplan, editor of the paper that swam upstream, quits NY Observer

It’s a short list of people who made my career possible. There were two editors at the Village Voice who dug my Usenet Letterman musings and offered me a column. There was Marc Gunther, who got me into not one but two sections of the Times. There was Steve Paul, who hired me and was my editor and who, through the magic of corporate downsizing, is my editor again.

And then there is Peter Kaplan. For 15 years Peter has edited New York’s snappiest, smartest print publication, the New York Observer, which from its precocious choice of paper color -- it used to be salmon, which was perfect because the Observer swam upstream so often -- to its affection for the perfectly-turned phrase and Botox-perpetual sense of surprise, was like a weekly tribute to Tom Wolfe. (In case you haven’t noticed, TV Barn’s headline style is itself sort of a running tribute to the Observer.)

Peter got me into the Observer in 1995 writing longer pieces about TV, particularly the Letterman show. It was in the Observer that my love for Dave went sour — nothing to do with that paper but more a coincidence of timing. Recall that Letterman had recently fallen into second place and everyone around him was blaming CBS. Well, it’s true that the network gave away affiliates in Detroit and Atlanta and six other major markets to Fox the year before. But Dave wasn’t Dave anymore, either, and his producers needed to recognize.

In the Observer, I was allowed to let loose. With many redactions from my editor Jim Windolf, I learned how to kick it up a notch. I wrote about Dave’s shabby treatment of a peach-eating tennis spectator, his on-air exercises in self-loathing (remember when he beat up the mannequin of himself?), his parting of the ways with longtime show producer Bob Morton. I scored a scoop when, thanks to observant Late Show News readers, I got a tape of HBO’s overnight airing of “The Late Shift” at a time when the channel was telling TV critics gathered in Pasadena that there was no tape.

None of this is online because the Observer didn’t start its web archive until after I’d gone to Kansas City. But Peter helped me get where I am today, and for that I’m grateful. Candace Bushnell, Nikki Finke and many others also need to give Peter a big thank-you for where they are today and I suspect they’re doing just that. (Right now I’m in Greensburg, Kansas, where the Internet is slow.)

During my freelance years, when I still lived in Chicago, I would go to New York often, and pay a visit to the Observer’s shabby-genteel offices on the Upper East Side. Peter told me once that he was preparing to launch a television column and would be delighted if I came to New York to edit it. On another trip, he reiterated that. But I had lived on the East Coast before, and Mrs. TVB had lived in NYC before, when her kids were small, and neither one of us was that excited about going back — especially with the Observer paying its famously, impossibly low wages. Even then, the kids packed into its offices were a few crucial years younger than me.

I made the right choice: Kansas City feels like home and truth be told, having a print job in NYC isn’t what it used to be. Looking back, though, my fondest freelance memories involve the Observer. Every now and then I will get a call from whoever is doing that TV column. Invariably the call begins, “When Peter heard about my story he said: Get Barnhart on the phone!” That always makes me happy.

But it’s never going to happen again. Peter is leaving the Observer after 15 years. Of course it won’t be the same. When is it ever? But he rode that horse through a decade and a half of media turbulence and countless reports of the paper’s imminent demise (and his departure from same). An amazing run.

I still get the Observer, print edition, and even with the switch to tabloid it’s still the same cheeky, opinionated, fact-based kick in the pants it always was. And for as long as it lives and then some, it will be not Arthur Carter’s Observer or the new guy’s Observer ... for the smart set, for those whose opinions mattered above all to the editors, writers and readers of that paper, it will always be Peter Kaplan’s New York Observer.